C.P.E. Bach - Sinfonias

A fun excursion into the pre-classical repertoire with the music of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. I listened four or five times to the Sinfonia Wq 183.3 performed by the Berlin Philharmonic under Antonini. It's an intriguing piece, sounding surprisingly modern because of its adventurous harmonic language and gestural unpredictability. The Berliner do it really well.

I have a Philips LP with 4 other sinfonias, performed by the English Chamber Orchestra led by Raymond Leppard at the cembalo. This must be early 1970s stuff. Not all of them are equally interesting. The first movement of the Wq 177 has something of the same daring and furor as the Wq 183.3. Wq 182.5 jumps out too. In the first movement CPE makes some really weird harmonic excursions. Its Larghetto is quite seductive as well. The finale has a striking menacing and aggressive quality.

It's somewhat of a mysterious figure, this C.P.E. Bach. Nowadays his discography seems to be quite scattered. Not quite clear where to start. But in his time he was very well regarded and infuential. Mozart referred to him as 'our father'. Beethoven also paid him respect. Stylistically he has been torn between the contrapuntal approach of his father and the more cultured, homophonic style of Italian opera fashionable in his day. His sinfonias distinguish themselves by their rhapsodic forms and offbeat, sometime avant garde solutions. It seems to me today C.P.E. would make an excellent composer of film music.

Der Bote - A Lubimov recital

Listened twice this week to this wonderful recital recorded by Alexei Lubimov. Why don't we have more of these intelligent and adventurous compilations, rather than perennial rehashes of the core repertoire? I'm transcribing Lubimov's own liner notes here:

Melancholy - that is the title one might give to this programme. Nostalgic pictures, some will suggest, and others: quiet meditation. Music written for oneself, one might also think; like a diary not meant for publication, in which you note down only what is most personal, what is memorable for no one but you and yet says a great deal.
Whatever else these collected pieces may be given, one or two words are not enough to show why these unpretentious masterpieces from three centuries so smoothly gather into a single strand that unravels a bundle of associations and memories so dear to their performer. Within these composers' works each piece holds a fairly modest place: in most cases it is but a marginal note in a long novel. However, linked together here by their unassuming, meditative poetry and the deeper inner impulse of their creators, who are not inhibited by any commission or external circumstance, they convey a particular significance to me - and to my listeners too, I hope - with its own logic and atmosphere. Thus what we have here is the story of a sort of journey, each stage of which is meant not so much to reveal the composer's soul as to bring us gradually closer to that essential source from which all these musical compositions draw their kinship and to which they owe their inner unity.
Then it no longer seems strange that Silvestrov's Messenger (Der Bote) should sound as if it had come straight out of the 18th century and C.P.E. Bach's Fantasia should appear nearly the most modern piece in the programme (Cage's In a Landscape); that the gentle wistfulness of Glinka's Parting (La Séparation) and the almost Brahms-like bitterness of Chopin's Prelude Op. 45 should have as their perfect counterparts the aloofness and chaste restraint of the elegies by Liszt, Bartok and Debussy; that Mansurian's Nostalgia and Silvestrov's Elegy should point regretfully to the fact that even the radical changes that followed Webern have vanished in a nostalgic past; and that the most avant-garde composer of the 20th century - John Cage - should present us with a most delicate and poetic flower, a genuine East Indian lotus flower floating away on a sea of oblivion ... Oblivion? - There is no such thing as oblivion, Silvestrov says with his Messenger; it is enough to fling open a window, to strike a match, to look at a cloud, to hear a triad, for memories - not only ours but also those, unknown to us, of all these messengers - to start working a miracle.